From Food Parcel Recipes to #Foodbankhauls: Performing Digital Culinary Activism in an Age of Food Crisis

This chapter examines three performance examples of digital culinary activism including the Guardian microplay, Britain Isn’t Eating (2014: Wade); the activist work of British celebrity cook and austerity campaigner, Jack Monroe; and Los Angeles performance artist, comedian and activist, Kristina Wong’s persona as a Foodbank Influencer. The chapter considers how these examples capture the contradictory ways that food functions in 21st-century Western culture, where tensions and slippages between cooking for survival and pleasure prevail. Wade’s microplay continues to resonate with the current context of a global cost-of-living crisis in which access to food and appropriate forms of care for the most vulnerable are ongoing, contentious issues. The argument places Wade’s microplay in dialogue with Monroe and Wong, who have both generated multifarious digital content across multiple platforms online. Central to the discussion is the complex role of the imagination in culinary activist strategy. The chapter examines how Monroe and Wong exploit and intervene in the neoliberal principles driving digital capitalism, using their profiles and platforms to re-imagine how shopping, cooking and eating might be conceived in an age of austerity. The analysis engages with the entangled contexts of food blogs and vlogs, hashtag activism, social media campaigns and the increasing visibility of food parcels and budget food hauls within these spaces. The author argues that Monroe’s and Wong’s multiplatform approach to personality-centred food activism offers valuable insights into how artists can call on the imagination as part of the ingredients needed to address the social problem of hunger.